Deborah Bloomfield

Some species across the world are known only from museum specimens. Sadly, for some, the information we know from the museums is the only information we will ever have, but for others the museum collections can be just the beginning. A species of rat known only from historical museum material has been pictured alive and […]

This is the real story behind the hairless bear that often circulates online and pops up on newsfeeds. You might have seen its image accompanied by sensational and misleading headlines, including the absurd notion that it’s a “new species” thriving in the ruins of Chernobyl.  But the truth is far less mysterious and far more […]

The world’s largest iceberg may soon not be. After a more than two-year-long adventure away from its home in Antarctica, new satellite photos have shown that the “megaberg” A-23A is starting to break into thousands of smaller pieces – resulting in what NASA describes as “a scene reminiscent of a dark starry night.” It’s a […]

Leonardo da Vinci – the artist, scientist, and archetypal polymath of the Renaissance – may still have descendants living among us. In a new book, researchers from the Leonardo DNA Project have put together the clearest view yet of the late genius’s family tree and even claimed they have found six of his living family […]

The Neanderthal occupants of a cave in central Spain had a pretty unusual tradition that seems to have been passed down through multiple generations and may have persisted for thousands of years. Filling their cavernous home with the skulls of large, horned animals, these prehistoric hominids are thought to have used the crania for some […]

Until not many years ago, scientists didn’t think planets could exist around a pair of stars. The complications from the three-body problem would make most of them unstable. Yet, we’ve found plenty of binary systems with planets. And it seems that they can get weirder and weirder. The system ʋ Octantis (pronounced nu Octantis) should […]

Lack of sleep can be seriously injurious to one’s health, but it’s not just hours a night that matter; quality sleep is important too. Sleep experts have long warned that snoozing after an alarm doesn’t give you what you need, but a new study shows we’re not taking their advice. Ideally, none of us would […]

In the Gobi desert lives one of the rarest animals on Earth. Known in Mongolian as the Mazaalai, the Gobi bear (Ursus arctos gobiensis) is the rarest of the planet’s eight bear species. As Sir David Attenborough said in the BBC series Asia, “They are so rarely seen they were thought to be a myth.” […]

As the most massive planet in the Solar System, and first to form, Jupiter’s gravity shaped the formation of everything else. To better understand how the newborn giant threw its weight around, astrophysicists have attempted to model its early years and have come to some surprising conclusions. Professor Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of […]

Researchers from a bunch of US government agencies recently published the results of the first-ever “Space Weather Tabletop Exercise” to assess their preparedness for a severe solar storm. It turns out, we’re woefully unprepared for such an event.  To sum up, an intense geomagnetic storm has the potential to spark regional-scale blackouts, radio communications outages, […]

The Chicago Archaeopteryx is a remarkable fossil, the “best preserved” of its kind, in fact. That’s according to palaeontologist Prof Jingmai O’Connor, who’s something of an expert in the transition that saw theropods morph into birds, and here Archaeopteryx is key. The oldest known fossil bird, it lived during the Late Jurassic 150 million years […]

Regular geometrical shapes are such a common feature in human civilizations that we often don’t realize that they are not that common in nature. But then you see a perfect sphere of plasma in the depths of space, and, well, that is certainly strange. An international team of astronomers led by Professor Miroslav Filipović from […]

Modern life. What a mess, eh? The horrors persist, but so do we, and might I inspire just a little bit of relief: at least we’re not living in the timeline where every major surgery was a world-first. There has to be a first time for everything, and when it comes to carving up the […]

You know how sometimes you can spend ages thinking about a problem, and then suddenly, the answer just clicks? These moments of insight are super-satisfying, but it turns out they can also reveal really important things about how our brains hold onto memories, as a new study from scientists in the US and Germany has […]

Are you a bear? An owl? A lion? A dolphin, maybe? No, this isn’t some weird knock-off Sorting Hat quiz – we’re asking about your chronotype. It’s a fundamental piece of your biology, but for some reason, we tend to think of it in terms of animals – or, worse, as evidence of laziness or […]

Chinese scientists report the discovery of a new strain of bacteria that exists only inside the Tiangong Space Station. The new microbe has been called Niallia Tiangongensis; it is related to the human pathogen Niallia circulans, which is linked to wound infections, and is usually soil-dwelling. Well, from humble beginnings to the stars. The Chinese […]

Humpback whales don’t always give birth in the tropics, as had previously been thought. Sometimes the calves come during their epic migration, and have to complete the journey in their mother’s slipstream. In fact, new observations reveal, these births can occur as far south as Tasmania or New Zealand, leaving the newborns to swim thousands […]

Researchers have built the USA’s most powerful laser yet, so powerful that the only way to describe its power is to compare it to the world’s annual consumption of electricity. The instrument, called ZEUS, is hoped to have applications in a variety of fields, from medicine to astrophysics. ZEUS is the first official experiment that […]

There’s a pretty big variety in the bird world. From tiny wrens and goldfinches to flightless species like ostriches and powerful swimmers like gannets, the birds of planet Earth have a lot of niches covered. However, there is only one bird species that can truly fly backwards.  Hummingbirds are famous for being pretty; in fact, […]

A tomb discovered within an elite necropolis in Pompeii has been identified as the final resting place of an ancient priestess who may have served the fertility goddess Ceres. According to archaeologists, this is the first grave ever to be connected to the cult of Ceres in the doomed city, and the woman whose ashes […]